Gilad Shalit, the IDF soldier released on October 18 after five years of captivity in Gaza met on Wednesday with French President Nicolas Sarkozy, at the Elysee Palace, AFP reported.

Gilad was accompanied by his parents Noam and Aviva Shalit who will also be guests of honor at the annual Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions (CRIF) dinner on Wednesday night. Gilad himself will not attend the dinner as according to his family, “his health does not permit it”

For the most part the freed soldier has been keeping a low profile – exceptions including an appearance at a Maccabi Tel Aviv basketball game and opening a Facebook account.

Shalit was released in October after five years in Hamas captivity in exchange for 1,027 Palestinian prisoners. Nicolas Sarkozy had tried to get him released and met with Noam and Aviva numerous times over the years. Gilad is a French citizen through his parents and Sarkozy had even called him “son of France.”

In January Shalit sent a letter in which he thanked Sarkozy and the French people for the efforts they made along the years to speed up his release and the support they gave him and his family.

“I want to thank you with all my heart for the unlimited support you have given me and your ongoing efforts to bring about my release,” the letter stated.

“Mr President, I’m aware of your great contribution to my release. I shall be forever grateful for that extraordinary, firm and uncompromising commitment,” Shalit wrote.

Shalit added that he felt grateful and proud to learn that Sarkozy defended him as the “son of France.”

::YNetNews

For five long years during World War II, Nahum Korenblum never left the side of his younger brother Yaakov as the two fled the Nazi invasion of Poland, escaped forced labor camps across Europe and ultimately joined the Soviet Red Army. There, they were separated and dispatched abroad, never to meet again.

Recently, more than a decade after they died, their children were united at Israel‘s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial thanks to a recently uploaded family photo discovered on its comprehensive online database of Holocaust victims.

It was just the latest successful byproduct of the memorial’s database, established years ago as a means of commemoration aimed at gathering the exact names of all the six million Jewish victims of the Nazi genocide.

But since the database went online in 2004, it has become a powerful genealogy tool that has led to hundreds of emotional reunions of long lost families.

In 1958, shortly after Yaakov moved to Israel, he and his wife filled out a page of testimony at Yad Vashem commemorating his dead parents. Nahum had meanwhile settled in Ukraine, where his surname was mangled into Koramblyum.

For the rest of their lives, the brothers searched for each other in vain, the paper trail often coming to a dead end because of the differing spellings of their names.

In 2006, Yaakov’s daughter, Bracha Fleishman-Korenblum, updated the online entry, attaching an old black-and-white photo of her grandparents and four of their children – including Nahum and Yaakov.

Dorit, Rafael and Bracha Korenblum unite with their cousin Gennadiy Koramblyum (Photo: AP)

Two months ago, one of Nahum’s American grandchildren stumbled upon the entry and was shocked to recognize his grandfather in the picture. He reached out to the Korenblum clan in Israel and a reunion was put into motion.

This week, Gennadiy Koramblyum, of Queens, New York, and his son, who is named after Yaakov, arrived in Israel for the wedding of one of their newly discovered relatives.

“It was joy, I cried, I didn’t sleep for two nights,” Gennadiy Koramblyum said. “Since I was a little boy, I remember my father told me ‘I have another brother, he is somewhere.’ He said ‘I always held him in my hands, I never let anyone separate us.’”

Healing process

Koramblyum’s father moved with the family to the United States in 1991 and he died there in 1997. Yaakov passed away in Israel four years later.

“I am sure they are happy now upstairs seeing us all here together,” Koramblyum said, shaking. “This means everything to me.”

His Israeli cousin shared that sentiment, saying the children’s’ joy was mixed with sorrow that their fathers never managed to reunite.

“It’s sad, but they meet in heaven,” said Rafael Korenblum, who bears a striking resemblance to his late father Yaakov. “A circle has been closed. There was something unresolved all these years, it lingered and now there is closure.”

Cynthia Wroclawski, the manager of Yad Vashem’s name recovery project, said such breakthroughs are being made possible by the increased openness of aging survivors and the curiosity and tech-savvy of their descendants.

“The lock is being opened by the younger generation. They have more intuition and more interest,” she said. “That’s the power of the database, the torch of memory is being passed.”

The project began in 1955 and had reached three million confirmed names by the time the online database was launched. More than a million more names have been added in the seven years since.

Efforts are continuing, primarily in Eastern Europe, where name collection is particularly difficult because Jews there were often rounded up, shot and dumped in mass graves without any documentation. The names of Jews killed at German death camps, on the other hand, are easier to collect because of meticulous Nazi records.

The information can be accessed online in English, Hebrew and Russian. Yad Vashem actively encourages survivors and their kin to come forth and fill out pages of testimony for those killed, before their names and stories are lost forever.

“We are not giving up, there is still much more to do,” Wroclawski said. “For these families, you see the rift of the Holocaust is getting smaller and that some kind of healing process is taking place.”

::YNetNews

Shulamit Imber of the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum in Jerusalem faces a gargantuan challenge when she goes to work.

As the pedagogical head of the International School for Holocaust Studies at Yad Vashem, she plays an important part in determining how future generations in Israel and around the world learn about the murder of six million Jews by the Nazis and their allies during World War II.

“Historians tell us about the past,” Imber told a group of reporters on a tour of the museum on Monday. “The educator tries to give it meaning.”

Throughout her career, the 56-year-old educator – who comes from a family of survivors – has taught countless teachers and students about the persecution of Jews before and during the war. Last year 1,400 educators came to Jerusalem to take part in seminars she helped put together with other museum officials, and she thinks their hard work is paying off.

Students around the world are more knowledgeable about the Holocaust than when she joined the museum in 1986, she said.

“We asked students in America, together with the Anti-Defamation League, to say what they knew about the Holocaust and the lessons they learned from it and we saw there was a rise their knowledge,” she said.

She attributes this rise in part to formal education but also to the place of prominence the Holocaust has in popular culture.

Although the Holocaust ended 67 years ago when the Allies defeated Nazi Germany, Imber said it the way it is taught is constantly changing. Nowadays educators try to balance individual stories with a general overview of events. At the renewed main exhibit at Yad Vashem, the faces, names and personal items of the victims are highlighted so that visitors can connect with their individual plight.

The new exhibit also illustrates how Jewish communities lived before the Holocaust, rather than focusing solely on their demise. For instance, the old display at Yad Vashem began in 1933 with Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in Germany. Visitors to the new exhibit, however, are greeted by a video montage showing everyday life in Jewish communities across Europe before the war.

Some say the next big frontier in Holocaust education is the Arab world, an issue Imber said was extremely sensitive.

“The conflict raises many things, it touches directly on many emotions, and some are quick to draw comparisons [between the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Holocaust],” she said. “Some people think Israel became a state because of the Holocaust.”

For these reasons and others most Arabs in Israel do not study the Holocaust at school. But Imber said Yad Vashem was currently working with seven Arab communities in Israel to teach local students about the Holocaust, and she hopes to increase such cooperation in the future.

“Some groups of Israeli Arab students have even traveled to Poland to visit the camps,” she said.

::JPost

TORONTO — There’s no need to man the ramparts, a new wave of antisemitism in not about to descend on Canadian society. Nevertheless, reports from Germany naming 74 individuals linked to neo-Nazi and white supremacist websites should alert Canadians to the fact that the “classical” antisemitic attitudes have not been vanquished.

That’s the perspective of Shimon Fogel, CEO of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA), who believes those named by a group of hackers in Germany are “the marginal of the marginal.” Yes, they can do damage, and their agenda runs contrary to Canadian values of tolerance and respect, but there is no large scale social movement afoot that threatens those values, he said.

Last week, CIJA issued a statement saying that “we were disturbed” about the reported extremists. “Such toxic hatred disgusts the overwhelming majority of Canadians… Today’s report should serve as a wake up call for all of us to remain vigilant in standing against hate, regardless of the community that is targeted.”

CIJA was responding to a CBC story on the release of names of people associated with neo-Nazi and other racist groups. The names were made public by a loose coalition of Internet hackers called Anonymous.

They revealed the names, e-mail addresses and passwords of 74 Canadians who were linked to Volksfront and Blood and Honour, two extremist organizations.

Two of the named individuals, Alistair Miller and Robertson De Chazal, were charged in Vancouver in connection with an attack on a sleeping Filipino man, who was sprayed with a flammable liquid and set on fire.

Another alleged Blood and Honour member, Shawn MacDonald, has been charged in connection with separate attacks on a Hispanic man, a native woman and a black man in Vancouver.

Fogel said the “episodic events… remind us that we cannot close these files. We need monitoring systems and lines of communication with the authorities so they’re halted and don’t leech into the general community.”

But, Fogel continued, it’s a far cry from times in history when it was feared hate groups could insinuate themselves into legitimate organizations and influence society.

“I don’t think we’re facing that level of extreme antisemitism that is trying to shape the general and societal policies or ideas,” he said.

Michael Harris’ recent piece (“Canada will be on the sidelines in search for Middle East peace”) brings to mind the adage that everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not to their own facts. Mr. Harris’ piece is so replete with factual distortions, and even outright errors, that it is difficult to know where to begin. Mr. Harris has every right to criticize particular Israeli or Canadian policy choices, but in doing so, he cannot manipulate facts and ignore inconvenient truths while maintaining credibility. Indeed, his assertion that the Government of Canada’s “policy on the Middle East is uninformed and crassly political” appears to be little more than pure projection.

Mr. Harris’ column is a lengthy tirade that accuses Canadian foreign policy of being essentially ignorant. “In Ottawa’s one-sided world,” he fumes, “there is no UN Resolution 232…” Mr. Harris is of course quite correct. UN Resolution 232 has absolutely no bearing on the Middle East (it is a 1966 resolution concerning Southern Rhodesia) and as such is utterly irrelevant. I assume Mr. Harris must mean UN Resolution 242, which is clearly defined on the Department of Foreign Affairs website “as a basis for peace negotiations as well as mutual recognition”.

Under Resolution 242, Israel’s neighbours (the Palestinians and nearby Arab states) are to provide Israel with peace and security guarantees in exchange for Israel’s withdrawal from territories captured in the (self-defensive) Six Day War. The brilliance of Resolution 242 is that it inextricably ties Israel’s interests (for peace) with those of its Arab neighbours (for an Israeli withdrawal). It is a binding prescription for each side to offer the other what they most require. You would learn none of this from Mr. Harris’ piece, which implies that 242 is applicable to Israel alone.

The column stretches the bounds of reality to the point of presenting fiction as fact. “(In Ottawa’s world, there is)…no Janine refugee camp atrocity”, Mr. Harris writes. He’s correct on this point, because in the real world (let alone “Ottawa’s world”) there never was an “atrocity” in Jenin. Independent organizations, including the UN and Amnesty International, confirmed years ago that what was initially hyped as a “massacre” in 2002 was a complete fabrication. It defies description – and demands explanation – how Mr. Harris could recycle such a libelous charge and lend credence to the outright lie that Israeli troops indiscriminately murdered civilians, long after the facts were established.

But what’s most telling about Mr. Harris’ column is what’s missing. His tour of recent history – minus inconvenient facts and context – most shockingly excludes two offers of statehood made by Israel to the Palestinians in 2000-01 and 2008 respectively. Both proposals included full Palestinian statehood and shared sovereignty in Jerusalem based on the 1967 lines (with mutually agreed land swaps).

The Palestinian leadership refused both proposals without counter-offer, twice derailing peace and sabotaging Palestinian statehood. Today, every last Palestinian refugee could have been resettled in a Palestinian state, just as 800,000 Jews who were driven out of Arab lands after 1948 have since been resettled in Israel.

But facts won’t get in the way of Mr. Harris’ established conclusion. “The rich potential of Canadian diplomacy,” he argues, “has been dumped in favor of a one-sided, fact-shifting, personal statement of undying support, no matter what, for Israel’s right-wing government.” Such an assessment is hard to reconcile with the $300 million Canada has dedicated to improving the situation of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and helping to build the vital infrastructure necessary for Palestinian statehood. In particular, Canada has played a key role in establishing an independent justice system that can ensure the rule of law for Palestinians, the cornerstone of any liberal democracy. Moreover, former U.S. Security Coordinator for the Palestinian Authority, General Keith Dayton, has asserted that the Canadian-led program – Operation Proteus – represents the single most successful international initiative to advance Palestinian civic capacity. These are facts that Mr. Harris, who is quick to accuse others of “fact-shifting”, simply cannot ignore.

But it appears that facts are beside the point. “The prime minister,” he writes, “and his cabinet, including John Baird, advance the notion that criticism of the Israeli government is the new anti-semitism, an absurdity with the handy benefit of killing all debate about this vitally important issue.” We entirely agree that it is absurd to characterize criticism of Israeli policies as inherently anti-semitic. But we challenge Mr. Harris to provide a single statement from the Prime Minister or his cabinet making such an assertion. Indeed, Israel’s supporters regularly criticize particular policies of the Israeli government, just as Canadians openly criticize the policies of our own government. What Minister Baird actually denounced was not criticism but the “constant barrage of rhetorical demonization, double standards and delegitimization” directed at the Jewish state. Reasonable people recognize that such vilification has nothing to do with policy criticism, but effectively rejects the right of the Jewish people to self-determination in their ancestral homeland.

Ironically, on the same day Harris’ screed alleges that it’s “guaranteed that Canada will be on the sidelines” when it comes to the Middle East, the Globe and Mail reported that Canada is now being viewed by Palestinian leaders as having an increased role to play in the peace process. As Majdi al-Khaldi, an adviser to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, revealed to the Globe: “We told the two ministers (Baird and Flaherty), the Foreign Minister and your Finance Minister, that you as Canada are friends of Israel, and are eligible to play even a better role as friends of Israel.” What’s more, the latest Environics poll published in the Globe and Mail shows strong support for the government’s Middle East policy, with Canadians (by a 2-to-1 margin) reporting that it “strikes the right balance.”

There are numerous other factual errors in Mr. Harris’ piece that I could spend time correcting. As mentioned above, it’s bad enough to read that he has mangled UNSC 242 as “232″ and misspelled the city of Jenin as “Janine”. Such inexcusable sloppiness alone should signal to the reader that Mr. Harris is asking not to be taken seriously.

But what’s equally worrisome, and worth dispelling, is the underlying premise of his column. Contrary to what Mr. Harris implies, both sides will have to make painful compromises if we are to see peace take root – and there must be a recognition that this conflict is not a zero-sum game. Both Palestinians and Israelis hold legitimate aspirations for their children. On the Palestinian side, this means the creation of an independent Palestinian state. On the Israeli side, this means the right to exist in security within recognized, defensible borders.

I see these two goals as fundamentally compatible. But there are those who apparently see Israeli and Palestinian aspirations as mutually exclusive, and choose to condemn and assign responsibility to one party alone – as Mr. Harris has so viciously done. Such a worldview could only be characterized as either sadly ignorant or intellectually dishonest.

Shimon Fogel is the CEO of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs.

TEL AVIV, Israel—Lifting a half-century veil of secrecy, Israel’s Mossad spy agency is opening its archive this week to reveal the story behind the legendary 1960 capture of Nazi mastermind Adolf Eichmann.

There he kept out of sight until 1957, when his eldest son, Nick, befriended a girl named Silvia.

Moshe Arens, Haaretz

No Israeli could have failed to notice the radical change in weather over the past two months. Forecasters predicted another dry winter, and fortunately they turned out to be wrong. And while Israel is still suffering from a water shortage, for the moment the situation is not as dire as we had thought.

But has anyone noticed that there is another change on the horizon, one that has confounded the prophets of doom? Slowly but surely, it is becoming apparent that the international political climate in Israel is far better than had been predicted, and it seems to be getting better all the time.

Last week the Canadian foreign minister, John Baird, announced during a visit to Israel that Israel has no better friend than Canada. “Ottawa”, he said, “stands for what is principled and just, regardless of whether it is popular, convenient or expedient.” Baird added, “Israel is a beacon of light in a region that craves freedom, democracy, human rights and the rule of law.”

Ever since Stephen Harper became prime minister of Canada five years ago, Canada has consistently demonstrated its friendship with Israel. This had not always been the case, Canada’s policy toward Israel over the years having been lukewarm at best.

It is not only Canada, a member of the G8 forum of industrialized nations and a NATO member, that is emphasizing its support for Israel. The policy of the recently constituted coalition government of the Netherlands, an important member of the European Union, is distinctly friendlier to Israel than that of previous Dutch governments. The Eastern European members of the European Union continue to consistently maintain close friendly relations with Israel. And last, but certainly not least, the sounds coming from the United States regarding the U.S.-Israeli relationship in recent months must be music to most Israelis’ ears.

The U.S. presidential election campaign, beginning with Republican primaries, continues to bring forth statements of unqualified support for Israel from almost all of the Republican candidates. And this at a time when the United States is dealing with a severe economic crisis that must obviously be at the top of the political agenda.

But it is not just the Republicans. President Barack Obama, who in the past had been a frequent critic of Israel, also seems to to have left that criticism behind and has recently been singing the praises of Israel. This change in weather clearly goes far beyond politics and reflects the deep-seated support for Israel among the American people.

Who still remembers the carping complaints heard in Israel not so long ago that Israel was becoming isolated, and that it was being left without friends who would support it or who could understand its government’s policies? Any regional event was pounced upon to support this argument. Israel should have apologized to Turkey, it was said, although any objective person knew that it was Turkey that should have apologized to Israel for the 2010 Mavi Marmara incident, in which nine Turkish activists were killed when they resisted the Israel Navy takeover.

Turkey’s Islamist prime minister decided to try playing the role of the leader of the Islamic world and to turn his back on Israel, but Israel was blamed for its increasing isolation. The turmoil in Egypt and Syria was said to be leaving Israel without friends. Who was it that announced last year that a tsunami was approaching and would blow Israel away in September 2011? And all this could be avoided, it was claimed, if only Israel would offer far-reaching concessions to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.

September has come and gone, and those who predicted a tsunami have learned again that making predictions in the Middle East is a dangerous business.

It is not surprising that democracies around the world are realizing that Israel is the only democratic country in the Middle East where the rule of law prevails, that this small country has faced great danger throughout its 64-year history, and that it has courageously overcome repeated aggression and terrorist attacks. It is no surprise that they are realizing it is unwise to take any risks at this time, and that during this period of instability and violence in the region, Israel is the only ally that can be relied upon. Maybe now what is seen so clearly from a distance may become clear to the critics at home as well.

::Haaretz

(JTA) — Scientists using ground-probing electronics may have discovered the missing mass graves at the site of Treblinka, one of the Nazis’ most notorious death camps.

No actual bodies were found and the graves were not excavated, in keeping with Jewish law, but bones and bone fragments were discovered in the ground, according to Caroline Sturdy Colls, a forensic archeologist at Straffordshire University in Britain who headed the research.

The underground structures detected by her equipment outlines what most likely are the graves.

Historians believe as many as 850,000 people, mostly Jews and some Roma, or Gypsies, died at Treblinka.

Although eyewitnesses told of the existence of mass graves, the Germans did everything they could to cover up their crimes, and the inability of researchers to find them was sometimes used by Holocaust deniers to claim large-scale murder did not occur at Treblinka.

Sturdy Colls used aerial photographs from the 1940s, satellite imagery, GPS mapping devices and new ground-penetrating radar. The radar could not detect corpses but could detect differences between the ground and disturbances and inconsistencies in the ground, such as buried objects, in 11 areas.

“Given their size and location, there is a strong case for arguing that they represent burial areas,” she said.

Sturdy Colls began working at Treblinka in 2010. She and her colleagues used radar and electrical imaging to get an idea of what was underground without actually disturbing the site. One of the first things she discovered was that the early maps of the site were incorrect — the northern boundary line was off by 160 feet.

After the war, Treblinka’s neighbors had looted some of the graves seeking gold they thought the Jews had hidden. That complicated the topography, but Sturdy Colls’ equipment found several pits exactly where witnesses said they would be.

The largest is 85 feet long, 55 feet wide and at least 13 feet deep, with a ramp for access. At least five others that deep also are in the area.

Treblinka was opened on July 23, 1942 as an extermination camp in east-central Poland, part of Germany’s Operation Rheinhard, the extermination of European Jewry.

It was designed for one purpose: murder. Ninety-five percent of the people sent there were killed immediately, mostly by carbon monoxide poisoning from tank engines pumped into gas chambers.

Treblinka was closed on Oct. 19, 1943 following a rebellion by the Sonderkommando unit — Jews forced to assist in operating the camp. Several German and Ukrainian guards were killed in the rebellion, enabling 300 prisoners escaped.

The Germans, however, were suddenly afraid that their crimes would be detected.

In 1943 they had discovered the bodies of thousands of Polish officers executed by the Russians at Katyn three years earlier, and realized that if anyone found the bodies at concentration camps, they would be blamed.

Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler ordered that whenever a camp was to be abandoned, all the bodies had to be exhumed and cremated, Sturdy Colls said.

Most of the victims at Treblinka had been buried right after death, although some had been burned. Following Himmler’s orders, the Germans dug up the bodies and cremated them using railroad ties and wood from the forest. They then reburied the ashes in the same graves.

At first they tried mixing the ashes with the dirt, but when that didn’t seem to work, the Germans simply dumped the ashes back in the trenches.

Sturdy Colls said that it takes very high temperatures to cremate a human body, and bone fragments almost always remain after the process, even when the cremation is done in a modern facility.

The job was done in a rush. As late as the1960s, human remains would emerge from the ground, often after a rainstorm.

The Germans leveled the camp, destroying all the buildings, built a fake farm on the site of the bakery and even settled a Ukrainian family on the farm to make it look as if nothing had happened there. Little of the camp remained above ground.

“They kept up this deception even if they abandoned the site,” Sturdy Colls said. “They had a fake railway station. They had signs. They obviously knew what they were doing.”

A five-day Polish war crimes investigation in 1946 found a cellar passage with the “protruding remains of burnt posts, the foundations of the administration building, and the old well. Here and there can also be traced the remains of burnt fence posts and pieces of barbed wire, and short sections of paved road. There are also other traces.”

The early researchers also found decomposing corpses that the Germans had misplaced. Construction of a stone memorial at the site also turned up human remains.

They did not, however, find the graves themselves until the current research.

“We mapped what we can. We’ve identified 11 individual pits that we can survey,” said Sturdy Colls, whose work is ongoing. “A good chunk of the memorial was built where they thought the mass graves were, so there is a good chance there are more in the forest and under the memorial itself.”

::JTA

Last week’s column examined Tony Burman’s claim in the Toronto Star that an Israeli attack on Iran this year is all but certain. This week’s column looks at Israeli analyst Ronen Bergman’s Jan. 29 New York Times Magazine piece, “Will Israel Attack Iran?”

At 7,600 words, Bergan’s is a major article. Yet, surprisingly for someone who concludes that he believes Israel will attack, he offers almost no compelling evidence to support this view.

Bergman acknowledges early in his piece that “Netanyahu and Barak have both repeatedly stressed that a decision [to launch a pre-emptive attack on a country that has repeatedly threatened to destroy Israel] has not been made and that a deadline for making one has not been set.”

He discusses at length the debate taking place in Israel, pitting former Mossad head Meir Dagan and former IDF chief Gabi Ashkenazi (among others who oppose a military strike) against the prime minister, defence minister and strategic affairs minister who, Bergman claims, favour such a strike as a final option.

Indeed, most of Bergman’s article is an exploration of this debate along with an account of what measures Israel has already taken. This includes, allegedly, covert Mossad operations to set back Iran’s nuclear weapons program, such as industrial and computer sabotage, and assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists. These are in addition to overt measures, namely the advocacy of biting international economic sanctions on Tehran.

There is no sense in Ronen’s sober examination that Israel is rushing recklessly, foolhardily into a war with Iran, let alone, as Burman suggested in his Star piece, that Israel is trying to ensnare both Iran and the Obama administration in such a war in 2012.

Ronen repeatedly raises the question of whether an Israeli assault even stands a good chance of being successful, where “success” means not destroying Iran’s capacity to produce nuclear bombs but only being able to set that back by a few years.  He cites experts who claim that, given all the time Iran has had to widely disperse its assets and bury them deeply under mountains, an Israeli assault might be able to set the program back by only several months. If so, some have asked, is it worth taking the risk and starting a war with potentially devastating consequences?

Even if the best that can be achieved is a three-year delay in Iran’s program, is a pre-emptive strike worth the risk?  “[The Iranians] are holding the fissile material at sites across the country, most notably at the Fordo facility, near the holy city Qom, in a bunker that Israeli intelligence estimates is 220 feet deep, beyond the reach of even the most advanced bunker-busting bombs possessed by the United States.” If the US, with strategic bombers that Israel lacks, doesn’t possess the capabilities required to destroy such a vital target, what can Israel, which relies on the US for bunker-busting bombs, do?

Well-known analyst Barry Rubin has been looking at this debate with cool detachment. He recently wrote in the Jerusalem Post that the fact that some Israeli leaders talk openly about the possibility of attacking Iran “is the biggest proof that they aren’t about to do it.” Israel has always acted on the basis of surprise, not by declaring publicly and repeatedly its military plans.

On the other hand, several analysts have argued that only the US has the military might for the sustained bombing operations required to inflict sufficient damage to Iran’s nuclear facilities. Matthew Kroenig makes such a case in “Time To Attack Iran”, found in the January-February issue of Foreign Affairs. Yet even Kroenig acknowledges the claims of critics that success is far from assured and that since Iran might be able to reconstitute its program, the US might only be delaying “the inevitable.”

Kroenig’s bottom line, however, is that the only thing worse than a preemptive assault on Iran’s nuclear assets is living with a nuclear-armed Iran.

Paul Michaels is the Director of Research and Media Relations for the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs.

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